PTC Extends Alliances with Rockwell Automation and Microsoft

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

PTC and Rockwell Automation, Inc. announced Factory Insights as a Service, a turnkey cloud solution that enables manufacturers to achieve unprecedented impact, speed, and scale with their digital transformation initiatives. The new offering, unveiled during PTC’s Global Partner Summit event at the LiveWorx^® 2020 digital transformation event, marks a significant advancement to the collaboration among Rockwell Automation, Microsoft, and PTC.

Factory Insights as a Service, powered by technology from PTC, Rockwell Automation, and Microsoft, is delivered in the cloud in a turnkey fashion and supports the industry’s most common high-value digital transformation use cases:

• Real-time Production Performance Monitoring
• Asset Monitoring and Utilization
• Connected Work Cells
• Digital and Augmented Work Instructions.

Factory Insights as a Service includes many of the key product components of PTC and Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk^® InnovationSuite, including PTC’s industry-leading ThingWorx^®, Kepware^®, and Vuforia^® products, optimized for OT data coming from Rockwell Automation’s best-in-class automation and information offerings. It leverages Microsoft’s cloud, industrial IoT, and edge services, including Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge, enabling manufacturers to rapidly connect individual sites and implement projects across their enterprise network. This enables customers to save time and money by reducing the complexity that they typically undertake as part of an industrial internet of things (IIoT) implementation and greater digital transformation effort. Factory Insights as a Service is a perfect on-ramp for manufacturers interested in improving their operations by providing valuable intelligence and insights on operational performance, asset utilization, and workforce efficiency.

“Factory Insights as a Service offers our industrial customers a leaner, accelerated approach to digital transformation,” said Jim Heppelmann, President and CEO, PTC. “The offering reduces reliance on IT and OT resources, and, most importantly, takes a value-first approach that allows manufacturers to focus on initiatives that create business impact at scale.”

In today’s digital-first environment, manufacturers require solutions that solve complex infrastructure issues, data accessibility challenges, and reduced resources. With Factory Insights as a Service, manufacturers can achieve a 90 percent reduction in development time and cost and as much as 90 percent faster time-to-value for the most critical high-value use cases underpinning industrial digital transformation.

“Simplifying and accelerating digital transformation initiatives for our clients is a fundamental driver for our alliances with PTC and Microsoft,” said Blake Moret, Chairman and CEO, Rockwell Automation. “Factory Insights as a Service builds on the breakthrough capabilities of FactoryTalk InnovationSuite to quickly operationalize some of the most critical use cases improving production, asset, and workforce efficiency, while future-proofing our customers’ digital transformation roadmap.”

“We believe in the power of collaborations to help manufacturing companies accelerate the delivery of value to their customers and unlock new business opportunities. By teaming up with PTC and Rockwell Automation to converge IT and OT excellence, we empower businesses to rapidly deploy their relevant use cases at scale – from asset, workforce, and production-floor performance to accelerate impact across the global production network,” said Jason Zander, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Azure at Microsoft.